Perimortem

Genre: Sidescroller, Platform, Runner
Keywords: 2D, Speed, Eerie

Perimortem, which means ‘at’ or ‘near death’ is a game created during the 24 hour DGDARC Sinterklaas gamejam, with the theme ‘time is over before you know it’. My team called Team GG participated from the UU, located in Utrecht, The Netherlands. In a competition against seven other teams, Perimortem came on top and was declared the winner of the gamejam!

Perimortem is a sidescroller runner in which the player has 30 secondes to move from one ‘safe zone’ to the other in a dark an eerie world. If he doesn’t find a safe zone in the maze of platforms or doesn’t reach it on time, they player dies. As soon as the 30 seconds are over and the player is safe, the timer starts again. When reaching a safe zone while the time is not up yet, the player faces two choices. Either stop at the first safe zone but gain less points, or risk everything and try find another one before time runs out for good. And just a hint, if you manage to survive.. You have 30 seconds.

Most of the idea’s and mechanics for Perimortem have been designed in collaboration of the entire team during brainstorms. Individual chunks then got divided and improved by the person who was in charge of it. Even though I am mainly an artist, I also consider myself a designer and therefor also participated in this process. The biggest task I worked on though was defining an art style and producing all the necessary assets, particle effects and animations for the game. Not so many 2D assets needed to be made but building blocks needed to fit, colors needed to be tweaked, particle effects had to be polished etc. I am also the one that came up with the setting, which gave me more ease in finding a fitting style.

When producing Perimortem, we utilized the theme of the gamejam by putting emphasis on ‘before you know it’. We created a game mechanic revolving around an invisible timer. Players have to find a safe zone before the end of the timer and traverses a world through platforming while the clock is ticking. This creates an interesting mechanic where the players may choose to skip safe zones because it gives them more points, they believe they have plenty of time and they are confident they will find another safe zone. Because invisible mechanics are often frustrating, we strived to give the player many hints about how much time he has left. The most important hints the game provides is through the music, which gets more tense as the player starts to run low on time. This intensification is done by overlapping tracks created for specifically this purpose. The levels in Perimortem are generated through procedural level generation, which always creates a feasible path.

Since we only had 24 hours, the game still needs polishing and could be improved on many degrees (we have a wish list). Nothing has been decided yet, but perhaps we may continue working on Perimortem in the future.

A build of the game will soon be put online here on my website, but in the meantime, it can be played here.